Wednesday, October 08, 2008

'Hard working'. This has been widely used in the American election - hard working taxpayers/middle classes etc. Now I notice Guido has fallen for it - 'the hard work of Britain's 28 million taxpayers.' This is empty flattery. Any large enough human sample will contain approximately the same proportions of hard workers and soft slackers. Being a taxpayer or middle class does not mean you are necessarily hard working. Rhetorically, it's a way of smuggling in a consoling sense of entitlement, as in, 'I am middle class, therefore I work hard, therefore I am entitled...'

The Japanese have a weird and wonderfull work ethic, if a department head works untill midnight, so does the entire department, even though they have nothing to do and sit around reading newspapers, this to save the face of head poobah.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.